This Land

by Dan Barry

  The risk paid off. In September 2002, a diving buddy rose to the surface to exclaim: That’s it! It’s got initials all over it! Mr. Shaffer immediately went down to see for himself. There, amid the river’s murk: the Indian Head Rock.

  Nearly every summer after that, Mr. Shaffer dove down to pay his respects to the rock. “Just to check on it,” he said.

  Then, late last summer, and almost on a whim, he and some diving friends resurrected the boulder with a harness and some barrels and air bags. They soon reported to Portsmouth’s mayor, James Kalb, that they had something to show him—and it’s bigger than a breadbox. The stunned and grateful mayor thanked them, saying a piece of Portsmouth’s past had been salvaged.

  Not everyone saw it that way. Some said that once exposed to air the rock would disintegrate; it didn’t. Some said that Mr. Shaffer needed a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to remove anything from the river; he agreed, and has applied for one after the fact.

  Some said the rock should not have been disturbed because that Charlie Brown-like face was an American Indian petroglyph. In November a delegation from Kentucky—with Dr. Fred E. Coy Jr., a prehistoric carvings expert, in tow—visited the Portsmouth municipal garage and waited anxiously while the doctor conducted his examination. His expert opinion: “I can’t tell.”

  No matter. Jagged verbal stones continue to be tossed from either side of the river. Reginald Meeks, the Kentucky state representative who sponsored the resolution of condemnation, said Friday that law enforcement officials were investigating what he described as the theft of a state antiquity. He said the rock should be returned to Kentucky, where state officials could examine it and decide its future.

  “I tell you, they just played cowboy,” Mr. Meeks said, voice rising. “And came to Kentucky and stole this item.”

  But Todd Book, an Ohio legislator from Portsmouth who last week introduced the resolution praising the rock’s resurrection, said Ohioans believed they were in the right.

  Mr. Book—who likes to think he is related to the John Book who may have carved that face on the boulder—said the story of the rock had already become an educational tool in Ohio. Fourth graders in the region are being asked to write essays on what the state should do with the rock, he said, while high school seniors are being asked to write position papers on the following: “Why the rock should be Ohio’s and not Kentucky’s.”

  Who knows how this heavy matter will be resolved. For now, though, an eight-ton chunk of sandstone, riddled with the markings of the long-dead, sits in a municipal garage near some city trucks and a lawn mower. And every so often

  a well-intentioned man wearing a hearing aid stops by to check on it.

  EPILOGUE

  In June 2008, a Kentucky grand jury indicted Steve Shaffer on a felony charge of removing a protected archeological object without a permit. Several months later, Kentucky’s attorney general sued the Ohio city of Portsmouth, demanding the return of the Indian Rock to the commonwealth.

  So, yes: Things got a little silly.

  The felony charge was eventually dismissed, but not before a disapproving Kentucky judge warned Mr. Shaffer “to be more careful of your actions in the future.” And in 2010, as part of a resolution, the rock was taken by flatbed truck to a county maintenance garage in Greenup, Kentucky—where it sits today. Plans for public display have yet to be realized.

  In the summer of 2017, Mr. Shaffer received permission to visit the rock, which he did. “Just to see how it was doing,” he said.

  Holding Firm Against Plots by Evildoers

  GRAND CHUTE, WIS.—JUNE 26, 2009

  On a buzzing boulevard in this busy shopping town, across from a supermarket and not far from a PetSmart, there sits a building that might be mistaken for a place where you can have your teeth cleaned, were it not for the name affixed to the brick: The John Birch Society.

  For some, that name means nothing. Or it sparks flashbacks to the 1960s, when the John Birch Society was synonymous with seeing red here, there and everywhere. Maybe you displayed a Birch bumper sticker on your car; maybe you enjoyed the Chad Mitchell Trio song mocking the Birch obsession with communism:

  You cannot trust your neighbor or even next of kin

  If mommy is a commie then you gotta turn her in.

  Yet for others, the John Birch Society is urgently relevant to the matters of today, in its support of secure borders and limited government, its distrust of the Federal Reserve and the United Nations, and its belief in a conspiracy to merge Mexico, Canada and the United States.

  This so-called North American Union, it asserts, is part of a larger plot by an amorphous, amoral group of powerful elite—including but not limited to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefellers—to take over planet Earth. Call it the New World Order.

  Some of these theories may sound like cable television chatter, or the synopsis of a Dan Brown bestseller. But Birch leaders say this plot is real, with roots going back more than 200 years to a secret, insidious brotherhood called the Illuminati, and with most American presidents among its many dupes and abettors.

  “We’ve always referred to it as a Satanic conspiracy,” said Arthur Thompson, the society’s chief executive, sitting beside an American flag.

  The society, which was established in 1958, says its membership has doubled in recent years, thanks to rising interest in these beliefs and, lately, to the policies of the Obama administration. But it will not provide firm numbers, other than to say it has tens of thousands of members.

  “We don’t want to let our enemies know our strengths or our weaknesses,” Mr. Thompson explained.

  Tall, white-haired and 70, Mr. Thompson was a soldier in the ideological wars long before Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck joined the contentious scene. He claims to have infiltrated Marxist groups in the Pacific Northwest back in the 1960s. “I would go casual,” he said, laughing.

  But dressed now in his preferred attire of dark blazer and red tie, he spoke earnestly of wanting to thwart the “insiders,” as he calls them. “It’s a war between good and evil,” he said. “And sometimes it takes a strange twist.”

  The society is familiar with strange twists. In late 2005, for example, Mr. Thompson became chief executive after staging a coup with the help of John McManus, the society’s most prominent member, its longtime president and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic. This prompted some ousted Birchers to disseminate recorded snippets of Mr. McManus lecturing to Catholic groups that Judaism became a dead and deadly religion after the establishment of the Catholic Church.

  Mr. McManus is also heard to say that militant Jews have influenced the Freemasons, who are “Satan’s agents,” “the enemies of Christ Church”—and, in the view of the John Birch Society, part of the Illuminati conspiracy to cause world upheaval.

  Mr. Thompson said that he was initially outraged by these comments, but that he now understands they were made in the context of Mr. McManus’s belief in Catholicism as the one true faith. He said the John Birch Society has Jewish and black members and has never tolerated anti-Semitism or racism, notwithstanding its notorious opposition to much of the civil rights movement.

  During a recent telephone interview in which he questioned the rigor of his caller’s Catholic education, Mr. McManus denied being anti-Semitic and said he was highly regarded by the society’s Jewish members. While they may not agree with his religious perspective, he said, he and they stand together in “working to save our country.”

  Toward that end, the John Birch Society—whose name honors a missionary and American intelligence officer killed by Chinese communists in 1945—still holds meetings in living rooms and public libraries. But it also maintains a handsome website that invites the curious to download literature and join a chapter. (“Click here to find like-minded people.”)

  A chapter usually requires at least 10 members, although Mr. Thompson said, “We’ll let them start at eight.” He said the mandate is to establish rela
tionships with a community’s opinion makers: “It could be a member of the city council, it could be the head of the chamber of commerce, key people in the Kiwanis.”

  But a request to talk to people who had recently joined the cause was met with resistance by James Fitzgerald, the national director of field activities, who began the conversation by criticizing a New York Times article about the society from 1966. The best he could do, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to suggest a visit to a Sunday street fair in Union, N.J., where members would have a booth.

  The tip was solid: there, near a funnel-cake operation, a foldout table covered with Birch Society literature.

  The coordinator was Chris Nowak, 24, a substitute math teacher who said he joined after his father, a longtime Bircher, re-educated him about American history; for example, he now understood that the United Nations was founded by President Harry S. Truman “and other communists.”

  With Mr. Nowak were Ray Tisch, 37, an electrical engineer, and Matthew Yamakaitis, 49, a warehouse worker, who said they had joined the John Birch Society within the last two years because they shared its concerns about the North American Union, the mainstream media and the conspiracy of elite insiders.

  “At the highest levels there are controls in place,” Mr. Tisch said. Mr. Yamakaitis agreed, saying that if the insiders succeed in creating a new world order, “It basically means less power for us.”

  “And more for the elite,” said Mr. Tisch.

  “The Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Rothschilds,” said Mr. Nowak.

  “Ssssssssss,” said the sausage cooking on a nearby grill.

  Back in Grand Chute, a drop in donations last year—standard during a presidential election year, Mr. Thompson said—has led to a few layoffs. Still, secretaries answered phones, editors worked on another issue of The New American magazine and, in a warehouse stocked with books and society literature, Dan Shibler waited to fill orders.

  Mr. Shibler, the shipping and maintenance manager, said he joined the society as a teenager in the 1970s after attending one of its summer camps, where educational sessions were mixed with fun activities like fishing and swimming. Those camps are no more; among other reasons, it became easier to reach young people on the Web.

  Still, the work continues. The men and women of the society have helped to get resolutions opposed to the North American Union introduced, and occasionally passed, in state legislatures. It recently participated in many of the “tea parties” held this spring to protest government growth and spending. And, of course, every day it fights the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the elite group of insiders—evil.

  It must be hard to relax. But Mr. Thompson said he draws strength from his faith, listens to music and finds other diversions. “Otherwise,” he said, “it would drive you crazy.”

  Keeping Alive Memories That Bedevil Him

  MANCHESTER TOWNSHIP, N.J.—AUGUST 14, 2009

  A retired postal worker, living not entirely at peace in an adult community called Leisure Village West, recently sent remember-the-date notes to large newspapers and television networks, then followed up with calls that often bounced to voice mail. The 14th of August; remember the date.

  He was not asking so much as he was demanding.

  Friday is the 14th of August: a dog day to many but always V-J Day to some, including this man, Albert Perdeck. It is the 64th anniversary of the surrender by Japan to end World War II. Attention must be paid, he says with urgency. He is 84.

  “Last year, 2008, there was no mention of this on the news,” reads his handwritten note to The New York Times. “I am requesting to have the day remembered by your in-depth reporting.”

  In addition to “V-J,” as in Victory over Japan, his note contains other abbreviations, including “P.T.S.D.,” as in: “The 17 months I was in combat still causes terrible flashbacks and nightmares of the mutilated bodies I helped to recover.”

  He does not care that some people are uncomfortable with V-J Day, given the close relationship the country now has with Japan, and given two other dates in August 1945 (the 6th: Hiroshima, and the 9th: Nagasaki). To him, the day carries its own political correctness: It celebrates the victorious end to a world-saving war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans died far from home. He saw some of them die.

  Mr. Perdeck sits in a small community room at Leisure Village West, surrounded by the brittle newspapers and old photographs he carries with him. “Everyone’s laughing,” he says of today’s world, voice rising again, tears coming again. “And I still smell it! I smell it now—beyond 60 years!”

  You’ve seen these Al Perdecks all your life—sipping early-morning coffee, say, with buddies at McDonald’s—but less so now. Stocky, not tall, with shock-white hair and a Norman Mailer look of pugnacity. Wearing shorts, dark socks and a boxy baseball cap embroidered with the name of the ship on which he served. You’ve seen him.

  Now imagine him in June 1943, the just-drafted momma’s boy from Newark. Hadn’t finished high school, hadn’t been with a girl. Soon he and a couple of thousand other sailors were aboard the U.S.S. Bunker Hill (CV-17), the aircraft carrier that would distinguish itself in the Pacific Theater. His job: tending to the fighter planes on the flight deck and giving the thumbs-up to the pilots before they soared into uncertainty.

  He turned 19 onboard, then 20. One day he is doing Donald Duck impressions with a friend, the next he sees a crewmate killed by shrapnel from a near miss. He is boy and man, both.

  On May 11, 1945, a kamikaze attack turned the flight deck of the Bunker Hill into an inferno. Pilots in the ready room died in their seats. Planes caught fire, their machine guns discharging rounds. The smoke created a black curtain that Mr. Perdeck could not quite part.

  Wounded: 264. Missing: 43. Dead: 346.

  V-J Day came just three months later. Mr. Perdeck remembers hearing the news while on liberty in Seattle. He ran through the streets shouting: “The war’s over! The war’s over!”

  Discharged as a seaman first class in 1946, he returned to Newark and met a young woman named Elaine at a dance at the Y.M.H.A. They married in 1950, moved to Ocean County, raised a boy and a girl, and struggled. A wood-pattern maker by trade, Mr. Perdeck finally took a post office job; for the security, he says.

  But that black curtain never quite parted. He hated Fourth of July fireworks and struggled with flashbacks, but it was more than that. Mrs. Perdeck said her husband would overreact when disciplining the children, when dealing with a conflict at work, when confronted, really, with everyday life. “He was always angry,” she says, with love.

  He could not shake free of the war. The burned and mutilated body parts. The rows of dead crewmates on the flight deck. That strange moment in the enveloping blackness when he stepped on a prostrate sailor, then yelled at the man to get the hell up, this is no time to sleep. The sailor, of course, could not wake.

  In 1997, 51 years after his discharge, Mr. Perdeck told his wife he needed to talk to someone. She knew what he meant. It’s about time, she said.

  A clinical psychologist, Dr. Walter Florek, eventually gave a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the rage that Mr. Perdeck felt, the isolation, the anxiety and the sadness had a name.

  Mr. Perdeck spent six weeks in a veterans’ hospital, where he attended lots of meetings but does not recall encountering another veteran from his war, the one a half-century past. Did his hospitalization help? He shrugs.

  These days, Mr. Perdeck accompanies his wife to various social functions at Leisure Village West, and he is active with the U.S.S. Bunker Hill Association, whose annual gatherings get smaller and smaller. When he speaks of other alumni by name, he usually adds a “May he rest in peace.”

  He also works to keep V-J Day alive. Last year he contacted The Asbury Park Press and asked how it planned to honor the day; the paper published a story about him. This year he went national, though he says he spent most of his time talking to machines.

  And every other Thursday, he
drives to Dr. Florek’s office on Route 70 in Lakewood for a group session with a dozen or so World War II and Korean War veterans, all of whom have P.T.S.D. A patient counselor named Olga Price guides the discussion.

  The group met again Thursday. An Air Force veteran with a squawking hearing aid. An Army infantryman with a cane. A Navy flyboy, now blind, who still sees the devastated Hiroshima he flew over 64 years ago. His walking stick is adorned with a small American flag.

  You’ve seen these men, these men who would never talk about it. But now, in the embrace of their own, they did, sometimes with sobs. One of them recalled killing an enemy soldier who was little more than a boy.

  “I see him virtually every day,” he said. “It just goes on and on and on and on.”

  The other men nodded without saying a word, including the one in shorts, dark socks and a shirt with the words “U.S.S. Bunker Hill” over his heart.

  From New Deal to New Hard Times, Eleanor Endures

  ELEANOR, W.VA.—DECEMBER 25, 2009

  Early spring, in the Depression year of 1935. A poor girl from coal-mine country, a dark-haired girl of 4, rocks beside her mother and two sisters in a car moving through the rain-swept night. Soon they will join her father, a Great War veteran who pads his shoes with cardboard. He has been working for months on some distant government relief project.

  When the car finally stops, the sleepy girl can see only a blur of mud and midnight. Not until morning does she take in this government project: a new American town, raised from a field by her father and other men with families caught in the stalled gears of a broken economy.